Category Archives: Uncategorized

Let us congratulate Lizeth and Zulema for the impossible trek they have conquered.

Lizeth speaks of the extremes of heat, self-reliance at an early age, the round the clock labor universe of farm worker (“plant — pick and pack”) and the all encompassing knowing that all this is to sustain all life. It is incredible to know that a 10 to 13-year-old wrote this with such wisdom and compassion — a hard earned essay.

Zulema charts the long cycle of migrant generations, the year-long calendar — from Asparagus to Apples — crushing through school schedules and towns. She wants to break the cycle of poverty — the same one my father dreamed of dismantling in the 1950’s. Zulema has succeeded.

So we congratulate these chroniclers of migrant struggle and continuity, these wisdom-word writers for a just Now.

My first experience with A Midsummer Night’s Dream was watching Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film production. I’m sure the visually gorgeous cast had something to do with it – what 12-year-old girl can ignore the charms of Michelle Pfieffer, Rupert Everette, and Christian Bale? – but it was more than that: something entirely new had taken place on the screen. For the first time in my adolescent life, a work of art had induced a feeling of liberation, a distinct, excited sense of possibility.

Every production I’ve seen since has been aesthetically unique. With its magic, fight scenes, fairies, the backdrop of a seemingly opaque forest, and the changeable world of its play-within-a-play, – A Midsummer Night’s dream begs reinvention, much as its mercurial characters change while they delightfully, aimlessly wander through the woods. Nothing is definite: the four young Athenian lovers — Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander — speak in absolutes yet are characterized by anything but. They escape into the forest in the middle of the night, where Titania, a righteous and strong fairy queen, is duped into falling in love with an ass, part of a magical revenge plot by the seemingly heartless fairy king Oberon, so touched by the unrequited love of Helena that he attempts to enchant Demetrius, her wayward lover, into returning her affections. The mischievous sprite Puck mixes everything up, and the rampant, secret love affairs that drive the foursome into the forest devolve into a brawl.

And yet, somehow, in traditional Renaissance fashion, we wind up with a wedding-and-a-marriage happy ending. Continue reading →

Several years ago, Tom Lutz, the founding editor of LARB, and I sat down to lunch to discuss a gleam in his eye: The Los Angeles Review of Books. Listening to Tom describe his vision, I experienced a “EUREKA!” moment. LARB was a brilliant idea whose time had come.

From that Eureka on, it has been my mission to support Tom’s vision, to help bring it to life, structure it, build it out, and sustain it. As Chairman of the Board, I have thrown myself into this effort, as have many others, ranging from volunteers to contributors to staff to subscribing members to Board members.

One of the original justifications for LARB was that the book review in printed form, especially in review sections in newspapers around the country, was dying out. As we developed our mission and strategies, we realized that there was a much larger role for LARB to fill. In the field of visual arts, Los Angeles has in the past 25 years evolved into a world class city. The same has happened on the music and performance scene. While these things were happening, the global recognition of LA’s literary scene had not risen to the level of the facts on the ground: LA has a population of educated, talented, and cultured readers and writers equal to any in the world.

Book publishing in the US has always been centered in New York. So have the major reviews. But the country has moved West. It was time for a Los Angeles Review of Books to counterbalance the East Coast hegemony and to provide a world class venue devoted to the culture of writing.

Recognition and praise of LARB as a major new force on the cultural landscape has come from many well-regarded publications, writers, and critics. The New Yorker called LARB “One of the instant jewels of the internet.”

LARB is an “all in” effort. In the past year alone we have published 1,270 essays, reviews, podcasts, and short films. In addition, we’ve launched two well received print publications, held very successful LARB Luminary Dinners, and conducted a variety of other activities. LARB is currently being read in all 50 States and in 150 countries around the world!

All this effort and output costs money. LARB is a nonprofit, but our monthly expenses are considerable. To cover our operating costs, we rely on gifts, donations, and grants. Mostly, we subsist on individual donations. Your donations.

The content we present takes hundreds of people to write, and dozens of people to edit, design, and otherwise support the product. We are delighted that so many readers enjoy LARB. We need each reader to support that which they enjoy.

To donate to LARB, CLICK HERE. You can become a member at any of the basic program amounts, or you can give any larger amount — $1,000, $2,500, $25,000 — whatever your capacity and commitment dictate. We are strongly committed to you, our readers, and are deeply appreciative of EVERY contribution, regardless of amount.

The timing of this appeal has special significance. After operating as a sponsored project under the aegis of UC Riverside Foundation and now PEN Center USA, LARB is finally going out on its own. There is considerable expense involved in the transition to an independent status. We need your help in supporting this next phase.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is making history. There has never been anything like it, and it has changed the cultural landscape. If you believe in Tom’s vision and in the team that works hard every day to realize it, as I do — if you believe what we’ve done with LARB deserves support — then please give your full support. We can’t do it without you.

Last week we celebrated the third anniversary of our first review, on our temporary Tumblr site, and the second anniversary of our official launch.

In those three years, we have published 1,275 reviews, 985 essays, 435 interviews, 22 ebooks, 5 tabloid print magazines, and 3 quarterly print journals. We have produced 60 short films, 50 podcasts, 27 live events, 12 radio segments, and 2 streaming book club meetings.

The community of writers, editors, and supporters who make this possible has grown from a small handful of enthusiasts to, as this incredible collection of work suggests, the equivalent of a small village of people dedicated to literature, ideas, art, and culture.

We have expanded as a community of readers, too, and we now have as many as 30,000 visitors a day from all over the world. Over a third of these readers are overseas — in 150 different countries — and the rest are spread across all 50 states.

Los Angeles has never before had a literary institution of this breadth and reach, and it has been made possible by the generosity of this community of readers. We are reader-supported in the same way that our NPR stations are listener-supported, in the same way that all our cultural institutions are supported — our orchestras, our opera houses, our dance companies, our libraries, our art museums. Like these other institutions, the Los Angeles Review of Books is the expression of a community’s belief in the importance of art and ideas. LARB is your work as much as it is the work of our contributors and staff.

We began our life under the aegis of the University of California, Riverside, and have spent the last year aided by PEN Center USA, but we are now starting to fly solo, as an independent nonprofit organization, which means we are paying 100 percent of our own way, with your help.

We launched our membership program as a way to thank our contributors and supporters, sending magazines and books as premiums to show our appreciation. This membership program, as we hoped, is now one of our main pillars of support.

Does an academic boycott of Israel advance, or damage, the cause for peace in the Middle East?

This and related questions around the wisdom of academic activism in general have recently brought some scholars and populist movements together, while they have torn other colleagues apart. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement has become the locus for a new front in the ongoing crisis over Israeli and Palestinian identity, sovereignty, and self-determination. For supporters, the movement to boycott is in the great tradition of academic freedom and discourse. For opponents, it is an example of gross overreach that will inflict even more damage.

When I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in January, I encountered many scholars and students who were deeply affected by the boycott movement — even more so when the association’s Delegate Assembly then approved a resolution criticizing Israel’s restrictive entry and residency policies. That resolution — and the American Studies Association (ASA) vote to boycott Israeli universities which preceded it — underpin one of the most contentious debates now tearing at the American academy.

An unprecedented forum appears on LARB today — “Academic Activism: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Ethics of Boycott (8 Essays)” — featuring eight leading voices in this debate: David Palumbo-Liu, Cary Nelson, Judea Pearl, Colin Dayan, David Lloyd, Russell Berman, Noura Erakat, and David Myers. Their powerfully incisive, at times heated essays illustrate just how complex, and deeply personal, this issue has become.

The issue is obviously fraught; we considered various ways to engage it, from a roundtable setting to having the participants read and respond to each other’s papers. We decided that, in the interest of intellectual integrity and fairness, we would allow each to make their case in detail. We hope to publish more essays and continue adding to this forum. For now, we are happy to present the most extensive discussion on the issue yet published; for your convenience, we will make a digital ePub of the forum available on April 1.

This Sunday, please join the Los Angeles Review of Books in celebrating the launch of the second issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal. With readings by Geoff Nicholson, Dinah Lenney, Alice Bolin, and Victoria Dailey at the Mandrake in Los Angeles.

The LARB Quarterly Journal is a testament to the fact that print is still thriving as readers continue to have a profound appetite for curated, edited, smart and fun opinion, written by the best writers and thinkers of our time.

We’ve carefully selected these articles, poems, interviews and essays—all written exclusively for this publication—for readers of just about any interest. The new issue of the LARB Quarterly Journal includes:

Victoria Dailey tells a true adventure story of how the two most famous escapees from Devil’s Island made it to Los Angeles.

Bruce Robbins considers the connection between reading novels and falling in love.

Juan Tomás Avila Laurel is Equatorial Guinea’s most important living writer, but he’s often been persecuted by his own state for his outspokenness regarding their blatant disregard of human rights. This week that disregard has turned dangerous, as Malabo’s infamous security forces have forced Avila Laurel, 48, into hiding for his work as activist. Avila Laurel had planned a sit-in protesting a recent wave of police brutality, and had requested official permission to stage the event, as required by national law. Soon after being denied the requested permission, Avila Laurel was informed that political party El Elefante y La Palmera [Elephant and Palm Tree], which had made the official request, had been declared dissolved by the Guinean government, and that he was one of several activists targeted for arrest without formal charges. The government crackdown centers on the political party El Elefante y la Palmera [Elephant and Palm Tree], known for its peaceful protests of police and government brutality, and is officially focused on the arrest of party founder Salvador Ebang Ela.

Avila Laurel, whose first book in English is forthcoming from And Other Stories in a superb translation by Jethro Soutar, is no stranger to government harassment. After declaring a hunger strike in February 2011, he eventually sought exile in Spain at the recommendation of national and international observers concerned for his safety, where he lived for two years before having his request for asylum denied. Since his return to Equatorial Guinea, Avila Laurel has been active in organizing peaceful protests of the Obiang regime, especially its police brutality.

Under the leadership of Guinean president Teodoro Obiang Nguema, now the longest-serving head of state in Africa, Equatorial Guinea continues to rank among the most corrupt states in the world. Its human rights record is particularly concerning. The Human Rights Watch World Report for 2013 reports:

Corruption, poverty, and repression continue to plague Equatorial Guinea under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has been in power since 1979. Vast oil revenues fund lavish lifestyles for the small elite surrounding the president, while most of the population lives in poverty. Those who question this disparity are branded “enemies.” Despite some areas of relative progress, human rights conditions remain very poor. Arbitrary detention and unfair trials continue to take place, mistreatment of detainees remains commonplace, sometimes rising to the level of torture.

Avila Laurel’s extensive work includes novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, like this newly translated poem from his collection Intimate History of Humanity:

Satire of
gothic Kings
in the mouth of black-haired men
with twisted brains.

Not evangelism
nor patronage
of the indigent indigenous
of faith and savageness.

To name the color red blood
because they don’t know
the purple of the prebendary.

Bantus with a black tongue
and with every cardinal sin on the tips
of their feet and fleshy lips.
It’s true, the great Christ didn’t die among us.
And beaches, rivers, plants and more plants that attract
the vice
of thieves with foreign illusions.
A name?
Many cite the refrain of the river.

translated from the Spanish by David Shook

Juan Tomás Avila Laurel’s safety is currently at risk; he faces dire conditions if captured by Guinean security forces. The international visibility of his situation is an important protection. Follow his case and learn more about what you can do at the PEN Center USA and EG Justice websites.

SINCE 9/11, several SF television series, from the one-season Threshold (2005-6) to the more recent Continuum (2012-present) have grappled with the specter of terrorism. Many, like Threshold and Continuum, play out hyperbolic scenarios of terrorist infiltration and attack, variously alien or from the future, to speculate on governmental and individual responses to terror. At their worst, such series offer us terror as spectacle, with all the perverse thrills of mass destruction. At their best moments, they become gripping meditations on the ethics of our various responses to terror. What price security? What sacrifices of freedom, individually and collectively, are we willing to tolerate to feel secure? And, most provocatively, what critiques lie latent or ignored in terror attacks—critiques that, had we paid sufficient attention to them, might not have become manifest so destructively?

Currently available on Netflix, Jericho is one such series that deserves another look. Running for two seasons (September 20, 2006 through March 25, 2008), Jericho is a frequently powerful drama about a small town in Kansas trying to survive in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack on the US that nukes 23 major American cities, including nearby Denver. What’s perhaps most interesting about Jericho is how much narrative force comes from not knowing who the “enemy” is. Islamic terrorists? The Chinese? Homegrown traitors? Midway through the first season, the Chinese make a food drop, with notes saying “Do Not Fight”—but this seems a red herring. And we eventually learn it is.

But who are the terrorists? Jericho plays a teasing version of hide-and-seek here. A whole subplot revolves around the character Hawkins, an FBI agent in hiding who relocated with his estranged family to Jericho just days before the bombs detonate. His background and intentions are shrouded in mystery. Indeed, for much of Jericho we don’t know what’s happening, with Hawkins particularly or the situation more generally. More curiously, we are also asked to identify with, or at least sympathize with, the plight of Hawkins, whom we are led at times to believe might actually be one of the terrorists, now trying to protect his family in the aftermath chaos. The confusion of identification is a striking aspect of many of these terrorist-themed, post-apocalyptic shows. Whom, ultimately, can we trust? Such questioning certainly builds narrative interest, but it also gestures toward conspiracy theories and plays to a sense shared by many viewers that we never really have the full picture—on the show or in real life—when it comes to global politics. The most we learn in Jericho’s first season comes late in the plot development: apparently “cells” set off the bombs in a coordinated attack to “change the world.” But who controls these cells, and to what purpose?

Jericho started airing in 2006, shortly before the economic collapse and right at the height of the Iraq war, which increasingly seemed run by—and for the economic benefit of—corporations. The plot of the show interestingly follows suit. An entire background story slowly emerges about one of the main characters, Jake, a badboy played by Skeet Ulrich, who gets stuck in Jericho after the attacks and eventually turns from punk and prodigal son to hometown hero. We learn that he had been a mercenary with shady dealings in Afghanistan, including arms running and association with a Blackwater-style company named Ravenwood (in a nice play on words). This background steadily becomes important, particularly as the town has to deal with Ravenwood, which has gone rogue as a gang of mercenaries (in the absence of government employers) to collect and control increasingly scarce resources. Jake’s association with Ravenwood is a sore spot, one he seems to spend much airtime regretting and trying to make up for.

Seemingly in contrast to this comment on government and corporate complicity, much of the first season is taken up with a kind of romance of the small town, whose isolation is its primary saving grace as it’s largely out of the way of most mercenary and predatory interests. The townsfolk use their relative safety to try to keep American traditions alive, such as celebrating holidays and hosting communal picnics. But those traditions keep running into their own economic issues. There’s a whole subplot about the local supermarket and the management and distribution of increasingly scarce resources. Who, or what, should control such management and distribution? What’s “fair,” particularly at a time of scarcity? The fight for mayor–between the salt mine company-owning Gray, who wants to take a hardline on crime as well as who’s in and who’s out of the community, versus the recently ousted patriarch Johnston Green, who seems to want more “state” control over the distribution of resources but who also talks a lot about democracy–seem to reference different approaches to economic policy (not to mention immigration) in the mid-2000s. Gray’s insistence on giving away all the available food seems to map onto Bush’s tax cuts and refunds and the conservative desire to deregulate more broadly: spread the wealth so it can trickle down. Johnston’s more city-controlled policies of food distribution harken back to Clinton’s sometimes austere fiscal management while maintaining more liberal policies of state support and social welfare. In the penultimate episode of the first season, the townsfolk make deals with the supermarket folks and the mercenaries to protect the town and its resources, primarily farmlands. At times of resource uncertainty, odd compromises must be made. It’s hard not to read such a plot as referencing the “compromises” made in the early 2000s: we went to war to protect our interests, but whose interests, ultimately? And at what cost ethically?

The second season heats up considerably as Jericho becomes part of the new emerging regime, the Allied States of America. We quickly learn that the ASA has been set up by the orchestrators of the terrorist attack, who blamed (and then nuked) North Korea and Iran for the attacks. They’re re-writing history (literally, through new textbooks) to cast the former US as weak, lacking military force of will. We also see Ravenwood, now backed by the ASA, assume policing responsibility for Jericho. In a likely reference to Haliburton, Ravenwood is owned by Jennings and Rall, the company that serves as the bureaucratic arm of the ASA. Interestingly, it’s worth noting that this season started airing in 2008, toward the beginning of the financial crisis, and, curiously, in that season we steadily see more focus on corporations and government complicity at the expense of democratic process and protection of civil liberties. One of the farmers, for instance, is maneuvered into signing a really bad mortgage contract that essentially indentures him to Jennings & Rall. Indeed, we slowly learn that J&R are behind everything, having created a plan in 1993 for the government to prepare for a disastrous attack—a plan that becomes the basis for an attack. The company IS the government. The government IS the company.

In some strange twists in the last episodes, we discover that “John Smith,” who’s been giving Hawkins information, has apparently set off the original 23 bombs in protest of corporate abuses. He wants to detonate the remaining bomb in the ASA capital Cheyenne to destroy the new government, which is completely “corrupt” as a government set up by J&R to further its corporate interests. He seems, though, like a psychopath, and we are not sure as viewers how to read his extraordinarily brief appearance in the second season. It almost feels as though the series is backing away from strident anti-corporate critique to blame the whole apocalypse on one lone nut. The series ends with two major characters, Jake and Hawkins, making their way to the Republic of Texas, which will apparently join forces with the former USA (headquartered in Ohio) against the ASA corporatists. There is a comic that propels the story into a “third season,” but you’ll have to check that out on your own. As is on TV, the story seems to end with the possibility that J&R and the ASA will eventually be brought down.

Jericho ultimately seems to play up some good old-fashioned American patriotism in its final episodes, simplifying its earlier narratives of and comments on the politics of economics. Nonetheless, it’s still striking as a show that steadily blends, in just two seasons, concerns with corporate-investment in the Iraq War with more general fears that the government is fully a corporate state. It’s hardly perfect in its latent critiques, and what’s not in the show is also odd. Most notably, racial and religious conflicts are pretty much absent, although it’s clear that Jericho is a pretty white town, with the only visible black family (Hawkins’) one full of deceptions and secrets, and an Indian doctor who turns out to be a drunkard. A more complex and compelling examination of government complicity with corporate greed might have woven in how frequently such complicity relies on religious rhetoric and racial bigotry. But not in this small town. Still, Jericho satisfies for the questions it raises and the buttons it pushes about the interconnectedness of politics and economics. Absolutely worth another look.

IN AN INSPIRED ESSAY on Baudelaire, the great critic James Huneker made an assertion I’ve never succeeded in shaking free, even when I’ve felt most unworthy of its substance: when literature is done well, Huneker said, when it is executed with the torque and pitch of true art, “there is no mental toil comparable to it.”

We writers require and deserve to be paid for that mental toil; I for one have always been glacial when it comes to subscribing to magazines or providing donations to worthy literary venues — glacial as in slow, indeed, but also glacial as in maintaining the frigid rationale that it is I who should receive money from magazines, not the inverse. I’ve recently become quicker to donate and subscribe to worthy outfits because the real estate for serious, sustained literary comment has been eroded by a lobotomized marketplace, elbowed away in favor of book reviews no better than book reports polluted by knee-jerk emotions, or else replaced by the pop-culture pabulum that belongs jailed inside People magazine.

What LARB has accomplished in so short a span often strikes me as outright miraculous: a respected venue for serious, sustained literary comment in a cultural milieu which should have shunned its existence, retarded its every development directly from gestation. You know the value of LARB not only because it has survived against every odd, or provided a conduit for your own work, but because you have spent time there with the work of others who have earned your regard. Now an uncommon opportunity is upon us (and we contributors, if we have pledged our lives to serious reading, have a moral imperative to employ that pronoun, us, never them). In five days LARB will receive the tremendous gift of $50,000 if we can match the funds.

If every contributor would join me in a one-time donation of $100, we’d go a long way in securing this generous match — in helping to secure the health and punch of a literary outfit which in turn helps to transmit our fought-for ideas to a discerning readership. Recalling Dr. Johnson’s most notorious quip, about the mercenary motive of every writer, let’s bear in mind that this grant also augments the ongoing mission of LARB to pay contributors a fee equal to their abilities.

We writers are poor by some standards, and especially during this holiday blitzkrieg upon our pocketbooks, I realize. But we are poorer still if LARB diminishes or disappears from a dearth of support, if this venue which helps to buttress our mental toil fails to be buttressed in return. Please do click here, and may you and your work thrive in 2014.